Intel Has No Short-Term Plans for Atom SoCs Built by TSMC.

Intel Corp. has no short-term plans to manufacture Intel Atom-based system-on-chips (SoCs) at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's capacities. Even though Intel itself if preparing a number of SoCs that it will make on its own fabs, it looks like the company has hard times convincing others to design SoCs powered by Atom x86 cores.

"While we have no short-term plans to bring an Atom processor manufactured at TSMC to market, the relationship remains in effect and we are still working with TSMC," said Intel spokesman Nick Jacobs, reports IDG News Service.

Morris Chang, the chairman and chief executive officer of TSMC, recently also confirmed that the agreement between Intel and TSMC was on hiatus due to lack of interest from parties that can develop SoCs around Intel Atom x86 core.

Intel and TSMC agreed to jointly build custom SoCs powered by Atom processing cores because Intel felt need to compete against custom SoCs based on ARM cores that dominate the market of consumer electronics. However, Intel failed to make potential customers interested in x86 in general and Atom in particular due to a number of reasons. If the actual performance between modern ARM and Atom cores is comparable and it is easier to integrate the ARM one, why migrate to Intel, especially if the whole product stack is ARM-based?

It is also not exactly clear why would a company develop its own SoC based on Atom, provided that Intel is gearing up with a lineup of won system-on-chip products designed for various applications.